I mentioned in my profile that my multilingual children are bright and inquisitive minds, and this statement calls for an explanation in the first place.

Inquisitive? Maybe I should better say open-minded or curious. Used from a very early age to travel to France and Italy on a regular basis, to meet with people of different nationalities, to eat a vast range of food, to accept different ways of behaving and thinking, my children see the world as their oyster. They are not afraid of travelling, of learning new skills, of trying new foods, of taking new habits.

Bright? For taking on several languages since birth, multilingual children are used from a very early age to comprehend many information at the same time. Consequently, their memory is phenomenal, their capacity to register information is impressive and their sense of logic well-developed. When their English friends at nursery were learning their first basic 300 words to describe their daily activities , my children had to learn three times the amount so they could understand both Daddy and Mummy speaking. While doing so, they were also confronted with the fact that words are just concepts and language is mainly abstract: if there are several ways to ask for a biscuit, certainly words are there to convey ideas, feelings, concepts. They surprisingly understood very quickly that you couldn’t speak any language with everyone and never got it wrong in using the right language with the right person. In fact, whoever tried to talk to them in a language that wasn’t their originally was given a strange look and a reply in the correct language (“Bonjour, comment ça va?” coming from the nursery teacher was received with wide eyes and a “good morning Miss”).